Thursday

After three days, packed with meals, museums, school visits and a stunning Christmas concert, not to mention dialogues about race, Haygood showed up on a recent Wednesday morning at Tuskegee University to bid his visitors from Maine goodbye one last time.

"You all said the trip surpassed your expectation, well it definitely surpassed ours," Haygood had said in a goodbye reception the night before.

The nine Mainers — educators, church representatives and other SoBo residents — arrived in Tuskegee Sunday afternoon to launch a sister city relationship between the communities — Tuskegee with a population that is more than 95 percent African American and South Berwick, which is more than 95 percent white.

“Everything we hoped to accomplish on this trip happened ten-fold,” said Karen Eger, librarian at the South Berwick Public Library in a presentation to the mayor and Tuskegee officials Tuesday night. “We are going home different people than when we came here.”

Eger also presented the mayor with a letter from South Berwick Town Manager Perry Ellsworth inviting Tuskegee folks to come north — in summer, of course. Haygood and many other Tuskegee residents expressed an interest in visiting for the local Strawberry or Lantern festivals.

“Our hopes were to make connections to have a future exchange and dialogue with one another,” said David McDermott, chairman of the Sister City steering committee and former South Berwick town councilor. “We have met several people we feel will make for great partnerships.”

Grace Jacobs, SAD 35 gifted education specialist, came with hopes of making connections between children.

“From the first minute I walked into the (Tuskegee) schools, I knew this was going to be easy,” she said. “There are oodles of kids in South Berwick anxious to be friends with kids in Tuskegee and oodles of kids in Tuskegee anxious to be friends with kids in South Berwick.”

Pastor Scott McPhedran of the First Baptist Church of South Berwick said, “The hospitality and exposure to the history of Tuskegee have been great. The residents in Tuskegee have made it challenging to prepare for their visit in August of next year.”

McPhedran suggested if the racial conversation could take place with an audience of 200 people practicing the words of God about love and forgiveness, the racial issue can be resolved. “We have had some amazing dialogue that can produce a difference if we can get this conversation in front of more than 20 people,” he said.

The South Berwick delegation included Heidi Early-Hersy, SAD 35 director of teaching and learning; Vicki Stewart, district director of communications; Julia Ouellette, representing the First Parish Federated Church; Rachel Martin, a board member of the community nonprofit SoBo Central; and freelance writer Amy Miller.

This sister city relationship, the first such exchange between two U.S. communities, aims to foster greater cultural understanding and sharing. The South Berwick Town Council and Tuskegee City Council each unanimously backed a proclamation last spring declaring its support for the relationship. The idea of forming a sister city relationship grew out of a series of programs at the South Berwick library focused on questions of race.

The South Berwick visitors participated in a discussion sponsored by the Black Belt Deliberative Dialogue Group during which a wide spectrum of differing views on racial conciliation were explored. From the discussion, several action items were pinpointed to broach those issues. They also met with Macon School District officials as they were fed by the central office staff and toured George Washington Public and Tuskegee Public elementary schools.

Later in the afternoon, they visited the Tuskegee University Bioethics Center and gained insight into the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” and saw what is being done from a bioethics perspective to prevent abuses such as those that occurred in this study, which involved research on African American men with syphilis. The Bioethics Center was formed with federal government money as reparations for its role over four decades in doing this research on Macon County men.

The delegation was moved to tears at the Tuskegee History Center, where the plight of those involved in the Tuskegee syphilis student study is commemorated.

The delegation also toured the Tuskegee Airmen Historic Site and Museum to gain a better understanding of the achievements and challenges of the first African American pilots in the U.S. military.

Among the many emotional moments during the visit, Eger reacted to a story told by historian Guy Trammell, a lifelong resident of Tuskegee. Trammell recalled the days when he dared not wander in the white part of town and how his parents often hosted students protesting segregation. But what really struck Eger, she said, was his story of how white residents resisted the integration of the town pool by one day putting glass on the diving board, the next day throwing acid in the water and the third day tossing their garbage in the pool.

“Who poisons their own water?” she wondered incredulously to town officials. “Let’s start taking the garbage out of the water.”

— Guy Rhodes and Jacquelyn Carlisle contributed to this report.

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